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3808 discussions

Suggestion to drop [t|k]win from Trinity and replace it by KWin4
by Martin Gräßlin 23 Dec '11

23 Dec '11

Hi Trinity developers, first of all: this is a serious suggestion and no try to troll you or anything in that area. Today I did some bug triaging for old bugs reported against KWin. With old I mean bugs reported against KDE 3.1 till 3.5. While I did that I realized how many bugs we fixed in the window manager after the release of KDE 4. All of those bugs are still valid for KDE 3.5 and your users do not benefit from the fixes done by us. The last commit done to KWin 3.5 was on October 3rd 2008[1]. Since then we fixed 617 bugs[2] and implemented 119 user wishes[3]. Just think about theses numbers. All those fixes your users are missing... I also just did a short count on our commits and only last month we had more than 50 commits, although we entered feature freeze. You see KWin is an active, maintained and developed project. Some weeks ago I heard that Krita developers requested a different name for the fork in Trinity, so I did the same for the fork of KWin. Reason was that I had looked at some commits done to the fork some time ago and considered them all in the area from plain wrong to harmful. I just wanted to make clear that we as upstream developers do not have anything to do with the development of this product especially as none of the patches were presented for review (all changes to KWin are peer reviewed). I had been thinking about the Trinity/KWin relationship for quite some time and todays triaging showed me that this just does not make sense. I do understand that you want to provide a KDE 3.5 desktop experience. This is great and I am all for it. But KWin 4 is a clear continuation of KWin 3. It is not a rewrite like other parts of the desktop. It is the same application, with more features, less bugs and in general a better performance. I am only aware of one feature that got dropped from KWin 4 and this could be easily maintained in a separate branch. Working on a window manager and compositor comes with great responsibility. It is one of the most complex parts of the desktop environment and introduced bugs affect all users and can be really harmful and very difficult to debug. Developing a window manager is not trivial and you have to understand how the window manager works, which - with all respect - is not the case in twin[4,5]. This is not surprising - it took me more than two years to learn KWin and there are still many areas where I am glad to have a team which can review suggested changes. Therefore I suggest to you to discontinue the work on twin and instead switch to KWin 4 as provided, developed and maintained by the KDE community. We are currently the window manager to three different desktop environments ranging from mobile to desktop. I am sure that we can support a fourth one which used to be the only one some time ago. For Trinity this gives about 60 kSLOC less code to maintain and develop. It removes one of the most complex parts and gives you the possibility to work on what really matters: providing a KDE 3.5 desktop experience by maintaining and improving kicker and kdesktop. Kind Regards Martin Gräßlin KWin maintainer [1] http://websvn.kde.org/?view=revision&revision=867241 [2] https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allw… [3] https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allw… [4] http://git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/tdebase/commit/kwin?id=1f40ada72d693d681… [5] http://git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/tdebase/commit/kwin?id=9cc1e2c1aa2629d49…

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Interesting comment in passing about TDE
by Darrell Anderson 22 Dec '11

22 Dec '11

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-mint-mate.html Last paragraph: "And this is exactly the one chance MATE has to make it big or become a collector's item, like Trinity." The author's remark is in reference to his own review some time ago: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/trinity-kde.html Darrell

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kdenetwork-3.5.13
by Bruce Dubbs 22 Dec '11

22 Dec '11

I've moved on to kdenetwork. The same build instructions for kdeadmin seem to work, but the build of kopete fails with: linux/videodev.h no such file or directory I can find the .h file on an older version of linux, but kernel version 3.0.4 only has videodev2.h. It looks like it is included from two files: kopete/libkopete/avdevice/videodevice.h kopete/plugins/motionautoaway/motionawayplugin.cpp Changing the include in these files to videodev2.h does not work (and I would have been suprised if it did). Does anyone know how to work around this issue? Excluding kopete will complete the build, but that certainly isn't optimal. -- Bruce

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Single-click is the default?
by Darrell Anderson 22 Dec '11

22 Dec '11

The default mouse click behavior was changed to double-click a long time ago in this patch: http://www.trinitydesktop.org/patches/1284792137:5ec667408632981bb995a8af48… Checking the affected 3.5.13 header file shows the change is good with no regressions. I also have my own default global $PREFIX/share/config/kdeglobals file that has SingleClick=false. The file does get installed and the setting is the same. When I create a new profile through the KPersonalizer wizard the default becomes single-click. When I skip the KPersonalizer wizard then the default is double-click. Therefore something in the KPersonalizer process is overriding the system defaults. Would somebody please confirm this behavior? Thanks. Darrell

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Device Icon Bugs
by Darrell Anderson 22 Dec '11

22 Dec '11

Although I have been submitting many patches, I am but a C++ newbie. There are some bug reports I very much want fixed. Two of the reports likely all have the same cause and likely could be resolved with the same patch. The problem likely is TDE not initializing correctly. Another report is closely related to those three: 385 Unmounted removable device icons do not appear on the desktop (http://bugs.pearsoncomputing.net/show_bug.cgi?id=385) 372 Storage media applet doesn't show usb stick at kde startup (http://bugs.pearsoncomputing.net/show_bug.cgi?id=372) 392 Desktop Device Icon Placement (http://bugs.pearsoncomputing.net/show_bug.cgi?id=392) The first two are usability bugs. Users expect device icons on the desktop. Icons should appear when TDE is started and should not require a device change event to show other icons. The third bug does not cause any crashing, but the placement behavior is contrary to 3.5.10 and other desktop environments. The traditional placement of new icons is in the first vertical left-side column, below existing icons, and when no room exists there, to start in the second vertical column, top. As TDE is being marketed as a traditional desktop, we should embrace those expected behaviors. Ideally, there should be a KControl option that dictates whether placement hierarchy is vertical or horizontal, but the default should be vertical. A fourth bug that hampers usage: 692 Kate: focus is broken when using the --use parameter (http://bugs.pearsoncomputing.net/show_bug.cgi?id=692) I've looked at the code and patching these bugs is beyond my current skill set. :( Hopefully in a year I can say differently, but not today. I'd be grateful if some of you C++ experts would look at these bugs. I'm ready and willing to test patches. And I'll likely learn something too. :) Thanks! Darrell

1 0

Cmake issues: Building kdebase with HAL support
by Darrell Anderson 22 Dec '11

22 Dec '11

Several bug reports focus on TDE not displaying device icons on the desktop or the standard popup dialog when a new device is detected. Refer to bug reports 372, 385, 634 for starters. These are serious usability bugs. Today I started investigating. I discovered that HAL support is not enabled in the default cmake options. I don't know why that is the default. I enabled HAL support with -DWITH-HAL=ON. The build failed for failing to find some header files. I submitted a small patch in bug report 755. I don't think my patch is the best approach. Instead I think the following environment variables need to be defined: $DBUS_TQT_LIBRARY_DIRS $HAL_INCLUDE_DIRS $HAL_LIBRARIES Although referenced, I don't think these variables are defined anywhere in the cmake files. How do I patch the cmake files to know those locations? I could hard-code those locations in my kdebase build script or build environment, but what is the proper approach? Darrell

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RSS Feeds
by Darrell Anderson 22 Dec '11

22 Dec '11

I just created bug report 750 (http://bugs.pearsoncomputing.net/post_bug.cgi): Akregator default feeds all point to KDE sites This is a somewhat serious public relations bug. Does the Trinity web site currently offer any kind of RSS feed? Even if the feeds are stale old news, anything would be better than the default feeds to all KDE sites. :) Darrell

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Unexpected kreadconfig/kwriteconfig messages
by Darrell Anderson 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

I have a testing account I use often. That account gets used in my real machines and virtual machines. For many years I have used a left-handed mouse (mouse buttons reversed). Because the virtual machine passes the mouse buttons transparently, I wrote a snippet for that user's .bashrc file to test the mouse button configuration and swap the mouse buttons in kcminputrc as necessary. That way I can use a left-handed mouse regardless of which environment the account gets used. To test my mouse buttons I run the following in that user's .bashrc: kreadconfig --file $PROFILE_HOME/share/config/kcminputrc --group Mouse --key MouseButtonMapping Simple enough. Today I booted my PII machine that has a partition for Trinity 3.5.13. I login from the command line, which means X is not yet running. When I logged in with that testing account I received the following message: NVIDIA OpenGL Driver requires CPUs with SSE to run. The current CPU does not support SSE. Superficially, I saw this message because originally I had cloned a testing partition from another hard drive and that partition had the proprietary Nvidia drivers installed. The PII machine does not support those drivers. Hence the messages. The real mystery is what is kreadconfig and kwriteconfig doing that indirectly causes those messages? I suspect a linking problem, which ldconfig resolved after I removed the Nvidia packages. Nonetheless, why are those two commands querying X libraries when X is not running? Is this a feature or a bug? :) Darrell

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Searching the SVN Repository
by Darrell Anderson 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

Is there a way to search the old SVN repository? http://websvn.kde.org/branches/trinity/3.5.13_frozen/ Darrell

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Enabling HAL support disables kdesu patch
by Darrell Anderson 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

I rebuilt kdebase with HAL support and now I am again seeing device icons on the desktop. However, the patch I submitted that reenables the Keep password check box in the kdesu dialog box no longer works despite running that patch during the build. That is, the checkbox no longer appears. I don't see why enabling HAL would have such an effect. Any ideas? Darrell

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